HVSM: An approach to exploiting the locality of the multi-node heterogeneous multicore system

One of challenges to achieve good performance on the heterogeneous multicore architecture is the exploitation of the locality of reference. While it is an issue for the single node system, it is still a critical problem for the multi-node system with PGAS distributed shared memory. In this paper, we address the exploitation of the locality of shared memory references in the memory hierarchy of the multi-node heterogeneous multicore system. First, based on PGAS, we propose HVSM, a hierarchical virtual shared memory, to model the structure of the complex memory hierarchy of the heterogeneous multicore system. And then incorporate a heuristic mechanism to exploit the locality among shared memory references. The analyzing results as well as the experiment results on the prototype system Cell-HVSM show that applications on HVSM can obviously benefit from our approach.